Where do you want us top go prepare the Passover?
Mark 14:12-16
And on the first day of Unleavened Bread, when the Passover lamb was being sacrificed, His disciples said to Him, “Where do You want us to go and prepare for You to eat the Passover?” And He sent two of His disciples…
Jesus sent just two of His disciples to arrange the Passover meal, a key celebration on one night of the multi-day, weeklong Feast of Unleavened Bread. Luke says Jesus sent Peter and John (Luke 22:8). Judas had already decided to betray Jesus (Mark 14:10,11). By keeping the arrangements relatively secret, Jesus ensured that the betrayal would not occur during this last meal with His disciples.
What Jesus had to say and do was too important.
Jesus directed Peter and John to go to the city and look for a man hauling a clay vessel containing water. What the man was doing was considered women’s work, so he would likely have been easily noticed. Whether this was miraculously divine insight by Jesus, or Jesus’ detailed planning (or both!) they found the man who led them to a furnished upper room where they made arrangements for the meal.
Mark’s gospel repeatedly highlights Jesus’ ministry through shared meals and “table fellowship.”
It is “wonderfully telling” that Jesus spends so much of his tour ministering through food. Only in Mark’s gospel does Jesus heal Peter’s mother who then prepares a meal for Him. He eats with tax collectors and sinners, plucks grain on the holy Sabbath, eats bread with his disciples who eat with unwashed and “defiled” hands, declares all foods clean, feeds and eats with a multitude of foreigners in a desert in a Gentile land (Mark 1:29-31; 2:15-17; 2:23-28; 7:1-15, 17-23; 8:1-10, R.S. Frederick, 2013).
Much of the disagreement Jesus ran into with the religious authorities – especially early on – was related to food and the company Jesus was keeping while eating (Mark 2:15-17, 23-28; 7:1-15). The table had become a place of exclusion to the Jewish people instead of a place where foreigners were welcomed. Jesus' discourse about the sheep and the goats is one of hospitality: caring for strangers with food, drink, and clothing. For the infirm and imprisoned, it means taking hospitality to them, including the gift of one’s presence (Matthew 25:31-46).
Reconciliation between people through hospitality and table fellowship was a key theme of Jesus ministry and a characteristic of the early church. Peter stayed in the household of Cornelius the Roman centurion, sharing table and roof with unclean foreigners who were also hated enemies (Acts 10:28,48).
But the message of reconciliation was “broader than food.” It was not just about interpersonal reconciliation. It was at its deepest level reconciliation between God and humanity, forgiveness of sins through the death and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah.
“When Jesus wanted to explain to His followers what his forthcoming death was all about, He did not give them a theory, a model, a metaphor or any other such thing; He gave them a meal, a Passover meal” (NT Wright, The Day the Revolution Began, 2016, p. 182).
And with the bread and wine of Passover, Jesus showed them exactly what He meant.
